Description

Important Note: This plugin still works at this time (wp version 3.4.1) but wont be maintained any longer. Please uninstall it and use RSS just better instead which covers the same functionalities and offers a few extra customizations too.

It displays the list of the latest news by Google News given localization (country-language), search word(s) or topic, number of displayable news and whether you want publication date, date, reference to the author displayed/not. The look & feel is customizable too. It works as a widget or shortcode.

Starting from version 0.7 – for Us and Canada (eng), it’s also possible to display local news by selecting city, state/province or zipcode [ Courtesy of Greg at transientmonkey.com(transientmonkey.com) ]
As a widget:

Drag & Drop your widget in the widget-ready area of your choice;

Choose a title to be given to your news list (optional);

Tick off the box if you want your title to be linked to the correspondent feed URL (optional);

Localize your news (language/country) (mandatory, default: us);

If you live in the Usa or Canada (eng only), you might want to enter a city, state or zipcode of the news you want to display (optional);

Select EITHER a topic OR search word(s) (because of Google rules, if you define both, the keyword(s) will be ignored) (optional);

Tick off the box if you want a publication date, time, excerpt (and how many chars of it) or mention of this plugin author displayed or not (all optionals);

target: either “_blank” or “_self” to get links opened in new/the same windows;

pubdate: either true or false to display the publication date/not;

pubtime: either true or false to display the publication time/not;

pubauthor: either true or false to display a link to the author/not;

Please note the following Google quirks:

Not all topics are set for all country/language. If you select a topic for a country where this is not provided (as yet?) then the “Top stories” (the default) will be displayed instead.

Google (not me!) allows to search by topic OR by search-word(s). The two “filters” cannot apparently work together (i.e. you cannot search for “hockey” in topic “Sport”).

Because of the above, if topic AND search-keys are both indicated, then the search-keys are ignored (but no, no error message).

The maximum number of displayable articles depends on the number of articles stored into the XML page (RSS feed page) of Google news website (i.e. if you wish to display the latest 15 news and the XML page contains 10 news only, then only 10 will be displayed).

The search syntax is that indicated by Google. In other words, in the search results, if:

all the words need to be present, then enter space-separated words (word1 word2 etc);

any of the words can be present, then enter words separated by OR (word1 OR word2);

words need to be excluded, then precede words with a minus or dash key (-word1 -word2);

the exact phrase needs to be present, then enter the phrase delimited by double quotes (“exact phrase”).

The Future

Better error messaging;

Less-nerdy attributes values.

Interaction

Would you like to see a new feature in this plugin? Please write me here: stefonthenet@gmail.com;

Would you like to see a broken/orphan plugin working again? Write me anyhow, I might (hey, MIGHT not will/shall) find the time to give it a look.

Screenshots

Widget Form explained.

Installation

From Plugins->Installed of your wordpress administration, select “Add new”, search for “google news just better” into the search text-box then click on ‘Install’ on the right when prompted with this plugin

OR

Download this plugin from [wordpress repository](https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-news-just better/), unzip it (a directory with 2 files will be extracted) and upload it to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory of your wordpress

Activate the plugin through the Plugins->Installed menu in your WordPress administration

See Usage (in Other Notes) for how to configure it

FAQ

Why the heck would I need/want it?

Well, it provides the latest news on any subject you want to choose in real time: can you imagine what boost of traffic can it bring to your blog? Let’s pretend you write about volleyball, knitting or lactose-intolerance. You just need to enter the relevant words in the Keyword(s) field or select a topic and wait for google to display the latest news on your subject.

Hey, I cannot find any configuration page in ‘Settings’ How does it work?

As a widget, you drag & drop the widget to any widget-ready area of your theme; open and complete the widget form, and click on ‘Save’ button. As a shortcode, you add/edit the post/page you want the news to be displayed into – IN HTML MODE! – and enter your shortcode as explained below in Usage “[gnews…”

Contributors & Developers

“Google News Just Better” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Change: Topic Science/Technology has been split into Science and Technology (2 topics) by Google itself.

Change: Improved description of sample shortcode

Fixed bug: Boolean variables were not properly tested and caused some inconsistent views when used as a shortcode

1.1

New feature: forced feed cache to refresh every 30 minutes instead of the default 12 hours

New feature: made it (hopefully) compatible with XHTML1.0 by writing all tags and attributed in small letters

Changed feature: fetch_feed function is called to catch the feed instead of simplexml_load_file. Some users were unable to use this last PHP 5 function on their own webserver. (http://php.net/manual/en/function.simplexml-load-file.php)

Fixed bug: incorrect links to feed URLs in shortcodes were generated

1.0

New feature: Made titles linkable for shortcodes too

Change feature: Added a feed small icon linking to its feed URL (instead of linking to the title directly)

HTML tags are now stripped from the description to make the mouseover experience more meaningful

Fixed a bug which prevented the title to be linkable

0.9

Fixed a bug (introduced in 0.8) which showed the widget title twice

Amended the 0.7 changelog/Upgrade notice as a few changes were forgotten

0.8

(never released. used to test the bug-fix)

Fixed a bug which prevented non-standard chars to be displayed properly

0.7

New feature: added selection of local news (working for Usa and Canada English only)